nation / world
Half of 25 Most Generous
Philanthropists in US Are Jews,
But Few Give to Jewish Groups
Jews made up nearly half of America’s
biggest philanthropic donors last year,
according to a calculation by Forbes
of who gave the most money away in
Priscilla Chan and Mark
2022, JTA.org reported.

Zuckerberg in 2019
In a year that saw their fortunes take
a hit amid declines in the stock market, America’s 25 “most generous givers”
donated a collective $27 billion, up from $20 billion in 2021, for a lifetime total
of $196 billion, according to Forbes. They included 12 billionaires with Jewish
backgrounds — a dramatic overrepresentation when compared to the proportion
of Jews in the overall U.S. population.

The Jews on the list include fi nancier George Soros, who gave away at least
$300 million to racial justice and humanitarian work in Ukraine and other causes;
businessman and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg with $1.7
billion in donations to charter schools, clean energy and fi ghting heart disease;
and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose charity donated more than $900 million,
with much of the money going to fund research into artifi cial intelligence and
genomics at universities.

One thing that stands out about these Jewish philanthropists is that almost
none focus on giving in the Jewish community. Only Lynn and Stacy Schusterman
of the Tulsa oil dynasty, who are paired together on the list, are prominent donors
to Jewish causes.

White Supremacist Nick Fuentes Returns to Twitter With Spree
of Antisemitic Comments
The white supremacist and far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes was reinstated
to Twitter on Jan. 24 and returned to the social media platform with a volley of
antisemitic posts and comments, including praise for Hitler.

Fuentes is a Holocaust denier who fi rst gained prominence after participating
in the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and was
banned from Twitter in July 2021, amid the platform’s crackdown on far-right
extremists, particularly in the wake of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6,
2021. He burst back onto the public stage in November, when he and Ye, the artist
formerly known as Kanye West, had dinner with former President Donald Trump.

Fuentes’ reinstatement comes as Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter last year,
restores the accounts of many people who were banned for advancing far-right
extremist ideas on the platform.

Ian Tuttle/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize via JTA.org
Majority in Netherlands Don’t Know Holocaust Aff ected Country
A recent study of the Dutch population conducted by the Conference of Jewish
Material Claims Against Germany showed an alarming lack of education about
the Holocaust in the Netherlands, JTA.org reported.

A majority of Dutch respondents across all age groups didn’t cite their own
country as a place where the Holocaust took place, despite the Netherlands
being the setting of the world’s most widely-read Holocaust memoir — Anne
Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which has been translated into more than 70
languages. About 75% of the country’s Jews were killed during the Holocaust,
one of the highest rates in Europe.

The study, for which Schoen Cooperman Research surveyed 2,000 people
across the country of over 17 million, also found that a majority of respondents
(54%) and a slightly larger share of those in the millennial and Gen Z generations
(59%) did not know that the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis totaled 6
million. Many said the total was 2 million or fewer. ■
— Compiled by Andy Gotlieb
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